You are not alone!

customers served (give or take a few hundred thousand) since September 2004!

Comments and opinions expressed on THE KNIGHT SHIFT are those of Christopher Knight and not necessarily those of subjects discussed in this blog, of advertisers appearing on it or of any reasonable human being. Any correspondence/irate letters/lawsuit threats/Nigerian e-mail scams can be sent to theknightshift@gmail.com.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

I'm fast becoming convinced: neo-conservatives are schoolyard bullies that never grew up like the rest of us. Today the punk who enjoyed branding others with a red-hot wire hanger while a college student is telling us "oops, it was bad data all along but I'm still going to send your sons and daughters to die!" From Bloomberg.com...

Bush Says Iraq War Was Justified Even Though Intelligence Wrong

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush accepted responsibility for taking the U.S. to war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence while saying the invasion still was justified by the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and international terrorism.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said today in the final speech in a series intended to outline his Iraq strategy. "Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision."

What the hell is this blithering idiot talking about?! Saddam may have been a bad guy but he had nothing to do with 9/11!

But wait, there's more...

"I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," the president said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. "I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities, and we're doing just that."

Remember when Bush told us that going to war was an "agonizing" decision that he didn't take lightly? Well, now it seems like he totally glossed over all reason and sanity, and plowed ahead with his little war.

I'll say it again: cowards should not send others to fight a war when they themselves would not. And that's all Bush really is in all this: a coward who hides behind others.

6
comments:

Wow, this is truthly breathtaking for its idiocy. I mean your coments here, not Bush's.

You don't think a lesson of 9/11 was not to sit around and wait til those who want to destroy us actually try? And we know Saddam has been hating us for a while and funding terrorists. You might disagree with the right policy prescription but to fail to even understand the argument shows wilful stupidity.

And your bullshit about cowards not sending people to war sounds like, once again, someone who disagrees with our whole concept of having someone other than members of the military lead the military.

Lots of people hate America. Even want to destroy us. That doesn't mean they'll be able to though. But does that mean that we are going to attack all of them?

My biggest contention with the Iraq war is that we are fighting for the Iraqi people's freedom, instead of them fighting for it on their own. The result of this will inevitably be that they will have been given freedom without having gained the self-discipline to know how to use that freedom. Iraq will tear itself apart within ten years after we are gone, if not sooner: there'll definitely be trouble from the Kurds trying to break away.

You misunderstand what I'm saying, Winston: there needs to be civilian leadership of our military. But that leadership absolutely must understand that the military is not a resource to be used wantonly, with abandon. The men and women of the U.S. armed forces are making it their paid professional duty to do something that all of us are supposed to be doing for free anyway: upholding and defending the Constitution. It's up to us to make sure that they are being used for just that purpose. That's what they signed up to do, with full faith that their time and energy would be spent toward that. And right now, our involvement with Iraq isn't serving that purpose at all.

Now I understand you much better. I like your argument that freedom is never appreciated unless won by the people themselves - not given by a foreign power. I'm not sure, however, how this doctrine can be reconciled with the successes of Germany and Japan, or the multiple failures in France after 1789.

But does that mean that we are going to attack all of them?

Of course not. That also is a silly argument, and I am sure you know it. Do you refuse to donate to cancer research because you'd also like to cure heart disease, diabetes and epilepsy? No, you do what you can. With Iraq, we could. And we get more benefit than from invading, say, Zimbabwe, Darfur or Bosnia. That doesn't mean its immoral to invade Iraq, nor immoral to invade Zimbabwe. You do what you can. Why are you demanding comprehensive perfection?

But I do believe you are consistent on your desire that the militarily not be used capriciously. I suspect you railed against Clinton back in your FR days for this. But that's not the argument you made. The one you made is a silly, shallow liberal bumper sticker. And you surely are smarter than the average liberal!

You couldn't have found a bigger Clinton detractor than me back in the day. The man set the tone for every misuse of the military that's followed since then. Remember how he used to lob missiles at tents in the middle of the desert during the grand jury probe?

"Conservative", "liberal"... I came to my senses on how meaningless those terms really are about five years ago (it was when I was a reporter at my first newspaper). When it comes to expecting sanity out of our government officials, I'm an equal opportunity loather :-)